this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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I've been to this bridge. It's the Devil's Bridge in Wales.
Here's another angle, ripped from Wikipedia:
The river underneath is insanely deep. Pictures do not do it justice just how much further it goes out of the bottom of this frame. You do not get out of there. That is death.
The bottom-most bridge was built around the 12th century. How the hell they managed to build stuff like this way back then staggers me.
Link to the wiki page here
That's when you just say frick it and caulk the wagon.
If you're trying to get from Missouri to Oregon and you end up in Wales then you've got bigger problems.
Somewhere Christopher Columbus^*^ shifted uncomfortably in his seat
^*^Obligatory frick Christopher Columbus
90m, that is deep.
I find it hard to relate with this sentence. That's just 3 bridges on the top of what seems like a natural rock formation, right? With 2 being arches and the top one being a modern-ish structure.
No matter how deep it is, it's narrow enough to just move a prebuild wooden foot bridge used for people to go around constructing the thing.
Duh, the Devil helpedz it's in the name.
You may joke, but that's actually part of the legend of the bridge!
The legend goes that a woman saw her cow grazing on the opposite side of the river.
To get it back, the devil offered to build a bridge in exchange for a living soul.
The woman threw a piece of bread across the new bridge and her dog went to eat it. The devil got the dog's soul 👍
Poor dog
While we're talking about Devil's Bridges, Hamburg has one, too: It was built to make crossing the devil's ford easier, so called because there were so many accidents there people couldn't explain it otherwise. A carpenter was contracted, who is said to have made a pact with the devil, that the bridge may stay, at the price of the soul of the first living thing to cross the bridge. On inauguration day, then, the local reverend blessed the bridge and set off to cross it, when out of the bushes a rabbit appeared and sprinted across the bridge. A statute memorialises the occasion:
...the less exciting explanation is that back when Holstein was still under Danish rule there were two bridges close together, and the double bridge then turned into the devil's one. dövelt -> Düvel in Low Saxon makes a lot of sense but is boring.
They really needed to pass that river.
Clearly a cousin of The Strid. Except the Strid is usually full to the brim and you can't see the literal death walls that lie beneath the surface.
Tom Scott made a video about it during his many adventures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSUmwP02T8
Labor was free because of slavery, so the economics were not the same. Current engineering has the concept of "over engineering" which is what cracked-up addicts in wall street call "building to last", due to the "expense" of not being shortsighted on a quarter by quarter basis.
Was it slaves? I am not seeing any references to slaves building the original bridge online anywhere, where did you see that? :o
I'm considering most economic systems prior to...the last few centuries to be essentially slavery. If some random king owns everything....
Not the same as America's slavery of course, nor is it necessarily legally structured slavery as existed in many societies, but nevertheless.
I think it's just an assumption based on the mode of society at that time in history. If it was built in the 12th century it was built by what we would now consider slaves. In the 1100s the land was divided into fiefs and the lord of that land considered the people who lived and worked on the land as part of that land: serfs. Unless this bridge was an exception to the rule, then serfs would have undertaken all the labour that got it built.
Yeppers that's the thought process. thanks for explaining better than me.
Slaves nowadays usually refers to either American-style chattel slavery or Roman-style slavery, both of which were systems much different than Serfdom.
But yes serfs will likely have built it, or were involved with the build under direction of hired stone masons, on order of a noble and with resources a noble paid for, under the general societal rule that serfs were to spend a certain amount of days a year working on infrastructure stuff as part of their taxes. For more details you'd have to dig into the law at that time at that particular place but those kinds of arrangements were incredibly common in Europe in the middle ages. You tended to be able to buy yourself out of having to work, and also pay your way in silver or gold out of paying in grain, livestock, etc.